A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Visual perspective
Marshall McLuhan (October 6, 1965, age 54). Is this any way to live?
Unaware of the environment that surrounds them, people do not see the world for what it is. Instead they insist on seeing it as it was. The present which contains the future lies before them, but they do not see it. Instead they see the past. You might say this is like driving with your eyes firmly fixed on the rear view mirror. Fortunately, I don’t drive.
Me (March 2010, age 57). Is there any other way?
If this is the human condition, what can we do about it? The possible courses of action would seem to be: (1) Distrust your senses; (2) Hope there are no bends in the road; (3) Find ways to wake yourself up* and see the present; (4) Hope that McLuhan got this one wrong.
*The standard approaches are: read history, travel, and look for patterns
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 325.
Tags: Communications, Culture, Thinking, Visual perspective
Marshall McLuhan (July 3, 1964, age 52). My statements are not opinions.
People seem to believe that I make things up out of thin air. It simply isn’t true. Everything that I say can be checked out, and if it doesn’t check out – à la Popper – it can be chucked out. If I was simply expressing a personal opinion I wouldn’t bother to say it.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Can we check this out?
Here is one of the statements of Marshall McLuhan: since the advent of TV Americans have become less visual.
(The visual he said perceive the world as “uniform, continuous, and connected” – like a page of printed text. To be visual is to view the world from a distance – to be uninvolved, objective, and rational. To view the world less visually is to perceive it more acoustically – acoustic space is “fluctuating, discontinuous, and disconnected” – the world viewed up close – intimately, emotionally and tactically. The less visual are less objective, less rational. They are involved.)
A case can certainly be made that this is true. Compare “The Dick Cavett Show” to “Oprah”, the “The Twilight Zone” to “Numbers” or “Perry Mason” to “Boston Legal.” America today has a more tactile less visual feel. Granted, it’s not a scientific test, but in a rough and ready way it does provide support for Marshall McLuhan’s statement.
Are we all becoming more or less visual? Is each generation less visual than its predecessor? If so, what difference does it make?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.304
Tags: American mind, Communications, Technology, Television, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (May 1964, age 52). North Americans are biased.
It is odd that North Americans will accept no other way of perceiving the world apart from the visual. The Brits have never gone this far, nor the French. To North Americans there is only one way for rational people to understand the world: in visual space. Visual space is continuous, uniform, and connected. That is the bias the North American brings to his understanding. Here only seeing is believing. There is no other way.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Today feeling is believing.
If Marshall McLuhan was right about the power of new electric media North Americans – especially those who are the second, third and fourth generations of TV kids – are no longer visually biased. The new bias is that of acoustic space, which is discontinuous, non-uniform, and disconnected.
Today seeing is no longer believing – feeling is believing. The good life is tactile: It’s “cool” “sweet” or “juicy.”
How many of the trends and assumptions of the world today fit with this new bias? Shortening attention spans, illiteracy and innumeracy, the failing of teachers rather than students, relative truth, the importance placed on intuition and feelings, emotional intelligence, grade inflation, political correctness?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.300
Tags: Acoustic, American mind, Communications, Culture, Education, Technology, Television, Thinking, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1965, age 54). What this restaurant is exhibiting is inhibiting
We went to one of those new restaurants manned by topless waitresses, the Off Broadway in North Beach, here in San Francisco. Ad men, Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen, who are orchestrating the marketing of me, thought it would be a great experience. It was an experience. One of the party was a Mr. Herb Caen a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He ordered the strip steak sandwich and carefully kept his eyes averted from our waitress’s breasts while she was taking his order. Claimed he was inhibited. I told him inhibited is an interesting word it’s the opposite of exhibited, and what is exhibited causes you to be inhibited.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The extensions of woman is man
Marshall McLuhan was not inhibited by what was being exhibited by the topless waitresses at the Off Broadway restaurant when he went there in August 1965 with Tom Wolfe, Herb Caen, Howard Gossage, and Gerald Feigen. He was it seems too busy observing to be inhibited. Two examples:
(1) During lunch a topless fashion show took place in which the announcer a fully dressed woman told the audience they were too quiet. They should be clapping more. “Where,” she said, “was the applause?” “Now ,” McLuhan said, “the word applause comes from the latin ‘applaudere,’ which means to explode. In early times, audiences applauded to show their disfavour; they clapped their hands literally to explode the performer off the stage. Hence you might say that, that the silence here is a form of approbation, at least in the classical sense.”
(2) McLuhan at one point looked around and said something like “the girls are wearing us. They’re wearing our eyes.”
Who is wearing who? How do you think McLuhan reported this excursion to his wife Corinne? What were the ad men, whose mission it was to celebritize Marshall McLuhan, up to in taking McLuhan to this restaurant with two journalists in tow?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pp 129-168.
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session.” San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
Tags: Advertising, Communications, Medium is the message, Technology, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (1965, age 53). Tom Wolfe got it wrong
Corinne read a bit to me out of that article Tom Wolfe wrote about me for the Sunday Magazine section of the New York World Journal Tribune, What if He’s Right? He said I like to wear 89-cent, Pree-Tide clip-on ties, the kind you can get in drug stores. Said something about the clip on mechanism being some sort of plastic cheater. Corinne says we should send him one of my ties so he could see how they really work. I told her we have better things to do than ship my ties, made to stay on by a comfortably fitting elastic band that goes around the neck, to the ever observant Mr. Wolfe for inspection.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). Tom Wolfe got it more right than wrong
“Clothes may not make the man,” said Kingsley Amis in a book about the James Bond novels, “but they can tell you quite a lot about him.” Whatever the clothes of James Bond tell you about the character of 007, the clothes of Marshall McLuhan, the extensions of his skin as he declared them to be, tell quite a lot about the character of high priest of pop cult, as Playboy was to call him. So much so that Tom Wolfe obtains a complete character analysis out just one piece of McLuhan’s clothing, his tie.
The tie in question is the opening subject of Wolfe’s essay: “The first thing I noticed about him was that he wore some kind of trick snap-on neck tie with hidden plastic cheaters on it. … I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.” And the tie is a subject Wolfe returns to repeatedly in the essay. While Wolfe did get – as Corinne pointed out – a key detail wrong, he was right, I think, about the importance of the tie for what it can tell us about McLuhan. It is, however, a symbol that cuts at least two ways. It is a fake tie. And the first image that pops up about McLuhan is that he like his tie is an imposter, a dealer in fake learning. The fake tie however has another message. The tie declares McLuhan to be middle class with no pretensions to style. Here is a way for a logical man in the tie-wearing 1950s and 1960s to bow to convention and obtain the virtues of comfort, low cost, and ease of wear.
Which is the real McLuhan? Which one does Tom Wolfe believe is the real McLuhan? What message(s) do the clothes you wear send? What message(s) would you want them to send?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pp 129-168.
Tags: Communications, Medium is the message, Technology, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Wyndham Lewis’s sketch is insulting
Yesterday, recall, I said that great painter Wyndham Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. It upset me. Why he drew me this way I still do not know. The fact that it is insulting is obvious.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Why and how the sketch insults
The sketch, recall, shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you. McLuhan has one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, is missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be McLuhan was hurt because the portrait was unflattering, but that is unlikely.
Here is what I think McLuhan found insulting about the drawing. Lewis did not idly draw McLuhan as one-eyed. The one-eyed figure of Greek and Roman mythology is the Cyclops. A race of giants who work in mines deep below the ground, with lamps hung from their foreheads to light their labours, making iron for the god Vulcan to forge thunder bolts for Jove. In this poison-pen portrait McLuhan is the Cyclops, labouring away in the mines of academia teaching English literature and Lewis is Vulcan. Vulcan, if you look up the legend, fell from grace by conspiring with Juno in a plot against Jupiter and was cast off Mount Olympus. Vulcan landed on the island of Lemnos. (Lewis was cast out of London and landed with McLuhan in St. Louis.) Because Vulcan’s wife Venus had an affair with Mars, Vulcan is also known as the patron of cuckolds.
The portrait is a medium. And Lewis’s poisonous message is that Marshall McLuhan is an intellectual slave. [McLuhan was inspired by Wyndham Lewis's writings. In particular, his idea of the critical role artists play in society and the way technologies wrap around and enclose people, separating them from one another and their sense of the world about them.]
Both McLuhan and Lewis were trained critics. For them this way of thinking in terms of ancient legends and symbols was not a leap, but a natural and obvious step to take.
Take a look at the sketch. (You can find it in Fitzgerald’s book on page 56.) What do you think? Is it insulting?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
“Cyclops,” and “Vulcan” in The Brewer Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
Tags: Art, Communications, Culture, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1944, age 33). Why does Lewis want to hurt me?
This year Lewis presented me with a gift, a charcoal sketch that was really quite a shock. Why he drew me this way I do not know. I did make a comment about his self-portrait, but I meant no harm. His cranial profile in his self-portrait did look just like a tomahawk. Really, since his coming here, I have only tried to help him with his work, his painting, to find him people who will pay him cash to paint their portraits. He needs the money. And he insults me this way. I do not understand.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). Lewis’s drawing is a medium of communication
Why Wyndham Lewis – a brilliant English painter and writer temporarily down on his luck that McLuhan admired and wanted to help – was angry with McLuhan is not known. We know he took offense easily, struck out viciously when angered, and was a social boor, and in 1945 would tell McLuhan he wanted nothing more to do with him. We can speculate on what it was exactly that caused him to flame out at McLuhan, but that is not I think very helpful. Instead I want to look at the ways Lewis’s drawing of McLuhan was insulting. That is to examine the way Lewis crafted it to spew forth his venom and have the effect that it did on McLuhan. Why? Because this is the method McLuhan learned from his teachers at Cambridge to analyse a poem or a novel, and which he employed to study media: Look at their effects. Understand how they are produced. Here is a charcoal sketch, a medium of communication. How does it have the effect that it does?
The sketch shows Marshall McLuhan sitting, legs crossed, looking directly at you, with one eye, a big left ear and the top half of his head, brain and all, missing. McLuhan’s biographers say the portrait upset McLuhan, but they do not say why. It could be vanity, but that seems unlikely, for the portrait is quite arresting, and if say a Picasso drew you would you be upset if he made you out of cubes and didn’t make you handsome? (To be continued.)
Have you ever been insulted by someone you thought of as a friend? How did they insult you? In what medium or media? With what result?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Fitzgerald, Judith. Marshall McLuhan: Wise guy. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2001, pp. 56-62.
Fritz, Robert and Rosalind Fritz. “R is for relationships,” a seminar. Robert Fritz Inc.
Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997, pp. 117-121.
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989; 1998.
*This is part of what Robert Fritz calls the “arithmetic of relationships”.
Tags: Art, Communications, Global village, Medium is the message, Relationship, Robert Fritz, Social media, Visual medium, Visual perspective, Visual thinking
Marshall (November, 1949, age 38). An airport is a wonderful thing
Visually that is. Last night I saw a friend off on the plane to New York, which left from Malton Airport. There is something grand about an airport especially at twilight when there’s just enough light to see but not so much as to take away the sky.
Me (October 2009, age 57). An airport is a horrible thing
The beginning to James Hilton’s Lost Horizon contains a magical scene in which three old school friends are having a party at Berlin’s Tempelhof International Airport. They talk, drink, and watch the big planes land as the sky turns from blue to black. Today such a scene is impossible to imagine. Since 9/11 the airports of the world have become increasingly unpleasant places to be without it seems becoming significantly more secure. The eye is forced to watch endless TV. The ear is forced to listen to endless commentary on the need to watch your luggage. The body is groped and scanned. Flights are more costly, take longer, and are less comfortable. Whenever possible I try not to fly.
Is there a silver lining to the modern airport? Can the past be recovered?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 207.
James Hilton. Lost Horizon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933. (Or watch Frank Capra’s 1937 film-version of the book, with the same title, starring Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt)
Tags: Global village, Medium is the message, Visual perspective
Marshall (December 1947, age 35). Art is necessary
If you haven’t developed sensibility in contemporary art – where everything hits you all at once from all directions – you can’t understand the minds of the middle ages and you can’t understand your teenager’s minds. Artists live, medieval men lived, your TV kid lives in acoustic space.
Me (September 2009, age 57). Surround yourself with art
More than half of the people in the world today live in acoustic space. If you’re running a business and you’re over 50 you need to surround yourself with contemporary art to develop the sensibility you need to understand the people who work for you.
If you’re younger, you probably need to build up a visual perspective, to understand the people you work for. How? Listen to radio (NPR, CBC, BBC) as McLuhan recognized so long ago, it’s a visual medium.
Do you do anything to develop a visual perspective?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here tomorrow
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and Wiliam Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 190
Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. Edited by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini. Montreal: Canadian centre for Architecture, n.d.
Tags: Acoustic, Art, Business, Global village, Medium is the message, Visual medium, Visual perspective